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3 Tips To Detect & Fix Mobile Search Leaks, Improve Your CTR

I’m pleased to join you with my first installment for the new Mobile Mondays column. As a long time Analyze This columnist, I appreciate SEL making space for the mobile marketing conversation.

Mobile marketers love the data Google announced recently at the “Think Mobile” event. First, they shared that one in seven queries (15%) now happen on smartphones — up from 10% six months ago. Second (and not quite so lovely), 80% of brands they surveyed admit to being unprepared to do mobile business (not a surprise, but it still spells o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y).

First, Audit Your Mobile Clickstream

The fact is, even the 80% of brands who aren’t optimizing for mobile still receive a growing volume of mobile search traffic as a dividend from their desktop SEO investments. Mobile organic listings are basically “ads”.

What’s the value of optimizing content for mobile? Just multiply current mobile organic volume by 1.115 and get in the game. (As I covered last month, calculate your share of click-through in keyword markets by extracting mobile query demand data from Google’s new Mobile Keyword Tool.)

If you’ve already invested in mobile optimized content, audit your mobile ads and landing pages (paid and organic search) to ensure they point to the proper mobile content. Seems obvious, but this is one of the most common and undetected mobile marketing mistakes brands make. I’ve covered examples recently from brands like Target, Amazon, Home Depot, JC Penney’s and others.

In each of these cases, mobile content has been prepared, and is generally available, yet can only be accessed by hitting the mobile home page first. This is a huge problem for all non-brand search queries, because it breaks the searcher clickstream, forcing the user to retype a query or renavigate the site at the worst possible time (when they have to be mobile!), increasing bounce rates and ad costs, and decreasing conversion and ad relevance. And it isn’t just limited to mobile search, it also affects mobile clickstreams on social campaigns and mentions on Twitter and Facebook.

The culprit is nearly always the mobile “sniffing” technology used to detect smartphone users and redirect them to a more mobile-friendly page. In some cases, the brand may not offer a mobile friendly page for the particular requested product or category page.

In other cases, brands that use increasingly popular mobile content platforms (like Digby and Usablenet), fail to map the native URL requests to the mobile platform URL. As a result, the sniffer logic either breaks or produces a bad mobile experience.

How To Detect Mobile Leakage

Whether you have mobile content or are planning, technology needs to put in place to successfully detect and direct smartphone visitors to the right content.

Here are a few ways you can detect, quantify, and begin to correct this problem, or at least limit its impact:

1. Set up a status code report that lists all mobile page requests resulting in a 301, 302, or 404 code. This can be overwhelming on a large site. Setup alerts to notify you if volume exceeds a certain threshold and deserves attention.

2. Log and parse referring URLs by keyword markets and referrer type to determine where mobile sniffer leaks are impacting the most, and to prioritize remedies and actions – whether that means shoring up logic holes, or hard coding new rules for critical campaigns.

3. Add proactive page intelligence. In a prior article, I discussed a mobile issue encountered at Zappos. Imagine in this example, Zappos provided a smarter mobile 404 page, programmed to parse the referral URL, extract the search query, and provide the mobile user with pre-loaded clickable query link (eg “continue shopping Zappos for men’s wool socks here”) which executes an internal search query when clicked. This mobile page would have been more helpful and actionable, and might have given Zappos a second chance to earn the business.

Whether you’re just getting into mobile, or have already made initial investments, respecting mobile customers’ time is just good business.

Armed with the latest data and technology, brands have every reason to invest in mobile content, ads, and optimization. According to Google, it’s worth at least 11% more business in the short run. Oh, and mobile customers will love you for it.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Brian Klais is founder and president at Pure Oxygen Labs, a mobile consulting and technology firm he launched in 2011, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin.
Previously, Brian was an executive at Netconcepts, a leading SEO consulting and technology provider to retail and media brands like Zappos, Home Shopping Network, Cabela’s, Discovery Channel, and Yahoo!. When Covario acquired Netconcepts in 2010, Brian became VP of Products.
At Search Engine Land, Brian mused on the intersection of search, mobile, and analytics in the "Mobile Mondays" column, and previously for the "Analyze This" column. He's a frequent speaker at conferences like SMX, Where2.0, AdTech, and Shop.org.

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Jason Taylor

Dear Brian

I read this article with interest. Agreed that the ability to match and pass original urls through to a mobile optimized view is very important. In fact Usablenet’s Platform is the only platform that can achieve this and does this as a nature part of it’s process. So i wanted to help educate the community on this point with example.

For example if you try and go to a web PDP on Bloomingdales such as www1.bloomingdales.com/catalog/product/index.ognc?ID=518367&CategoryID=17397

The mobilized version of the very same url and link. All key aspects including tracking tags are past via The Usablenet Platform, this leverages the SEO work already added in the web.

Your observations of when this does not happen on a Usablenet powered site is due to a lack of redirect detail, as the redirect (detection of mobile device and redirect to mobile version), is one of the key aspect to this success.

So to full leverage your current SEO, you first need a platform such as Usablenet that can preserve all the page and tag data of the original url, along with smart redirect code (usablenet help clients in this area to get right).

I hope this helps, feel free to contact me if you need more detail.

Regards
Jason Taylor, VP of Platform Strategy, Usablenet Inc

http://PureOxygenMobile.com Pure Oxygen Mobile

Jason,

Thank you for clarifying your platform capability, and helping reiterate the theme of the article. Creating the seamless “mapping” (via smart redirect “sniffers” or other methods) is ultimately a configuration the brand must implement for success — still many don’t.

As one of the original architects behind the Mobile Site Optimizer solution offered by Covario, I appreciate your point: not all mobile platforms are designed with this capability in mind.

And I suspect you’d agree with my recommendation: that brands treat search integration as a requirement in their mobile optimization decision-making processes, not as an afterthought.